In the context of oil mining, the improvement of the hydrocarbon recovery rate in a well requires knowing the geological structure of the soil containing this well as accurately as possible. Much information is gathered in situ over the lifetime of the oilfield, then is analyzed and finally combined to create numerical geological models.
The number of meshes of such models can be in the neighborhood of several million when creating fine models. With current technology, it is not always possible to use these fine models in dynamic simulations, flow simulators only managing to handle models exceeding 500,000 mesh cells with difficulty.
Thus, geologists and reservoir engineers simplify these models to reduce the number of mesh cells while conserving as well as possible the information they possess: coarse models are then obtained.
However, such simplifications are not without defects.
This simplification step is difficult because certain simplifications, useful to geologists, compromise other simplifications desired by reservoir engineers, and vice versa. Indeed, geologists propose models by grouping together certain mesh cells according to their own judgment or analysis. These models are used for the evaluations of the production capacity and then validated (or invalidated) by the reservoir engineers. This simplification is therefore very detailed and requires many exchanges between geologists and reservoir engineers in order to obtain the best envisionable compromise.
There is thus a need to effectively simplify the models used for such simulations.
The present invention will improve the situation.